Let's Please Stop Crediting Ronald Reagan for the Fall of the Berlin Wall
On Wednesday, Berlin unveiled a plaque in honor of the 25th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s speech demanding that Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall,” delivered June 12, 1987. It was an exquisite, powerful, and truly historic moment worthy of commemoration. But Reagan’s sometimes-overeager boosters are making some bold claims about the role that both this speech and its deliverer played in the course of world history, another example of the ways that the politics of today are distorting our memory of one of the most complicated conflicts of the 20th century.
It’s not surprising that Reagan-boosters are getting a little carried away with his legacy, but the extent of their adoration is getting a little extreme. John Heubusch, Executive Director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library, wrote for Fox News that the states of Eastern Europe “fell to freedom like dominoes” after Reagan’s words “pushed the first one over. One cannot ignore how his powerful conviction ended the Cold War by firing a verbal salvo, an oratorical demand to let freedom prevail.”
It is certainly true that the Reagan presidency helped usher along the opening of the inner German frontier and later the demise of the Soviet Union. After all, his changes to U.S. foreign policy toward Moscow challenged, among other things, the status quo that assumed the Berlin Wall’s existence as inevitable. And Reagan reasserted the idea that simple coexistence with the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe was neither desirable nor acceptable.
But did Reagan’s 1987 address have much bearing on the actual fall of wall? That’s a newer idea, one that happens to put Reagan at the center of a wider narrative of communism’s descent in Europe. In fact, not only was Reagan out of office by the time the wall collapsed in the summer of 1989, but his speech had received very little coverage in the media, according to Time and to historian Michael Meyer, who wrote in his history of 1989’s revolutions, “Major U.S. newspapers with correspondents in Europe, such as the New York Times, carried stories that ran in the back pages.” Reagan also delivered the speech to an audience of about 45,000, one tenth the crowd estimated to have attended John F. Kennedy’s 1963 speech. When Reagan declared “Tear down this Wall,” it’s easy for us to forget now, he was the visibly aged leader of a lame duck administration clouded by scandal and corruption, Iran-Contra in particular.
Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/09/lets-please-stop-crediting-ronald-reagan-for-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall/262647/
Things of note:
- That the Jewish diaspora is far less apportioned around the world than ever before (in modern times), since 81pc of world Jewry now reside in either Israel or the United States;
- The population of North Africa shrunk into non-existence between 1948 and 1970, a consequence of the founding of the State of Israel and the anti-Jewish pogroms which followed;
- The explosion of Israel’s Jewish population between 1970 and 2010, coinciding with the mass exodus of Jews from the former Soviet Union;
- That more Jews now live in Great Britain, Canada, and France than in the Russian Federation; and
- That in spite of Israel’s founding, the Jewish populations of North America, Latin America, and Western Europe have remained relatively stable.
The most enduring physical presence might be the Mikrorayon, gray apartment blocks originally built for Soviet administrators and the Afghan elite that stand amid the central suburbs of Kabul.
Also bearing the bullet and shell marks of the battles of the 1990s, they are cramped, run-down and patched, with clothing lines stretching haphazardly from windows to nearby trees. But the Mikrorayon are still some of the most prized homes for Kabul’s educated and wealthier middle class — a fact reflected in the loud street billboards for cellphones and private schools, and in the presence of young women walking the sidewalks in leg-hugging jeans unencumbered by the traditional dress.
“It is a safe place,” said Shir Mohammad Basheer, 50, a school principal who was fixing his car outside the four-room apartment that he shares with his wife and six children. “We have running water. We have electricity. We have central heating.”
“To be honest, Russia did this great work for Afghanistan,” he said. “We have not seen anything big built by the international coalition.”
A young Lithuanian girl sits on the toppled statue of Russian Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin in Vilnius after the monument was removed from the center of the Lithuanian capital, on September 1, 1991.
(Gerard Fouet/AFP/Getty Images)
